Microsoft Revamps Its Global Sales Team

Microsoft Corp. reorganized its global sales group Monday to focus on cloud services, and a person familiar with the plans said the move will lead to layoffs in the thousands.

Microsoft often reorganizes at the end of its fiscal year, which closed Friday. A year ago, a reorganization elevated Mr. Althoff and Jean-Philippe Courtois, executive vice president in charge of global sales, marketing and operations, to their current posts.

Microsoft is pressing to beef up its cloud-computing business to challenge cloud-infrastructure pioneer Amazon.com Inc. While Microsoft’s Azure technology has emerged as the top competitor to Amazon Web Services, its 2017 sales likely will amount to just a quarter of its rival’s, according to estimates from Deutsche Bank .

In his email, Mr. Althoff said the reorganization is intended to “align the right resources for the right customer at the right time.”

With the new structure, Mr. Althoff’s role is focused in part on working with partners such as software vendors and system integrators to convince customers to use Microsoft technology.

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